MARCH 20, 2000:
In 1963, a bullet smashed into President John F. Kennedy's skull in a
Dallas motorcade. The number of shots fired, the angle of impact, the
position of the gunman (men?)--these issues have been argued for the past
37 years. But each argument is invariably tested against a bedrock piece of
evidence: a strip of grainy footage shot on the scene by one Abe Zapruder.
The filmstrip serves as a photographic eyewitness; the home movie
intersects with history. All on the premise that the camera doesn't
lie.

That premise has been undermined, of course, by advances in digital
technology, which make it very easy to doctor the appearance of reality on
film. (Kennedy, the presidential Parker Posey, went from a starring role in
the Zapruder film to a cameo in Forrest Gump.) But the movies of
Craig Baldwin suggest that the notion of "cinema verité" has been a
shell game all along.

Since the late 1970s, Baldwin has been assembling an alternate history
of America, using the flotsam of discarded pop culture as his primary
medium. A San Francisco "media archaeologist" who studied under pioneering
experimental filmmaker Bruce Conner (whose "cinema concrete" appropriation
of found footage is a marked influence), Baldwin makes riotous collages of
educational films, corporate promos, creature features, and long-forgotten
archival clips. At one level, his thesis is simple: Film is always an
ideological tool--in movies, in ads, on the 6 o'clock news--and there's
always a man behind the curtain.

"I'm very skeptical about the veracity of film, that you can know things
for sure through cinematic representation," says Baldwin. "All films
are constructions. I call what I make 'pseudo-pseudodocumentaries.' "

Baldwin's pseudo-pseudodocs carry the same relation to news reportage
that a photocopied rant on a telephone pole bears to the Wall Street
Journal. "My histories don't claim to be right," he says. "They're a
shattered mirror." His best-known film, 1991's Tribulation 99: Alien
Anomalies Under America, creates a crackpot Western-civ course of 99
interlocked conspiracy theories. Some of these are blatantly ridiculous:
The basic premise is that aliens from the dying planet Quetzlcoatl
inhabited Earth in the year 1000, then remained undisturbed until the U.S.
started nuclear testing. But as the movie hurtles through the 20th century,
it blurs the line between what's crazy--psychic vampires, alien takeovers,
cloned world leaders--and what's lamentably true, from the United Fruit
Company's bellicose meddling in Latin America to Oliver North and
Contragate.

To "prove" his connections, Baldwin marshals a strobe-light barrage of
film clips relentless enough to induce a seizure. Flying-saucer shots,
military training films, monster movies, cheesy reenactments--he uses the
kind of stuff a serious documentarian would scrap for the nitrate. But he
accords them the same weight Oliver Stone gave to the Zapruder film in his
own conspiracy jamboree JFK, which came out the same year as Trib
99. Where historical epics use archival footage of ships at sea,
cannons firing, etc., to capture an air of realism, Baldwin ridicules that
idea by sifting through America's vaults of junk media and presenting the
results as unassailable documents. Which they are--though not in the way
intended.

Baldwin calls these films that fall between the cracks "the other
cinema," the name of the long-running San Francisco screening series he
curates. He's less interested in the Hollywood movies of the past than in
these odd artifacts, which he says offer a truer glimpse of the shaping of
American values.

"I'm less interested in what we were doing for leisure in 1959," Baldwin
explains. "I'm more interested in the values of consumption, environment,
technology. The educational films, the sponsored films, the industrials
indicate how ideology is inculcated." To Baldwin, a loony propaganda piece
like "Because We Care," an ode to the marvels of meat that was produced in
the '50s by Oscar Meyer, gives more insight into social attitudes toward
consumerism, commerce, and industry than the serious mainstream films of
the era.

That's the principle behind his latest film, Spectres of the Spectrum, a
found-footage sci-fi extravaganza that traces the seizure of electronic
technology by what Baldwin calls "the military entertainment complex." In
Spectres, the airwaves are ruled by indistinguishable forces of
government and commerce: Even spy satellites are bankrolled by Disney.
Against the threat of electronic calamity, the resistance leader Yogi (Sean
Kilcoyne) broadcasts televised screeds from a desert outpost near Las
Vegas. But his daughter Boo Boo (Caroline Koebel) travels back in time in
an Airstream trailer to save the world--a plot that involves intercepting a
stream of ancient TV signals.

The crazy-quilt structure gives Baldwin the pretext to hijack clips from
Gremlins, an instructional film starring Adm. Chester A. Nimitz, old
kinescopes of cornball TV science shows, and ludicrous corporate-sponsored
"historical reenactments." (The one depicting Alexander Graham Bell
inventing the phone looks like something cooked up by Webelos on acid.) As
jokey (and exhausting) as this bombardment is, Baldwin uses it to
illustrate a sobering point: History is written by the marketers and
copyright holders, not the inventors and visionaries crushed along the way.
These industrial films, however goofy, served as propaganda for the
military/mercenary interests that commandeered the development of
electronic media. And we swallowed it.

Baldwin calls this technique of image-stealing "jujitsu--using the
enemy's weapons against himself." It's a technique he himself swiped from
the Situationists, the prankster terrorists who sought to destroy the
fabric of reality by recontextualizing familiar objects and texts in
assaultive new ways. It also places him in a tradition of artistic
provocateurs that includes the icon-scrambling Barbie Liberation
Organization and the band Negativland, whose legendary
copyright-infringement battle with U2 is addressed in Baldwin's 1995
documentary Sonic Outlaws. Like these intellectual-property
squatters, Baldwin sees his found materials as no different from the
driftwood or shells a sculptor finds on the beach. "I'm a media cannibal,"
Baldwin says. "The street has its uses for things, that's what the
Situationists say."